Expanding Performance: Some Artists’ Books from Franz Erhard Walther and Stephen Willats
Sara Baudler
Following World War II, artists across Europe and North America began producing artworks in the form of books, drawn to the medium’s possibilities as object, social “space,” and alternative means of distributing art. This project explores the relationship between these artists’ books and performance, asking how the properties and formal qualities of books broaden our understanding of performances. Focusing on the artists’ book collection of Chicago curator and art historian Annie Rorimer, I use the robust literature on artists’ books, artists’ statements, and the books themselves to examine how artists used books to prompt, embody, document, and preserve performances. I find that the book form—which demands the viewer’s active participation—proposes the viewer as a performer themselves, generating new performances through the act of reading. This research will contribute to an exhibition of post-war artists books at the Special Collections exhibition gallery, which, crucially, will allow visitors the opportunity to physically interact with some of these books. By inviting visitors to perform these books through the act of reading, this exhibition also emphasizes the importance of preserving artists’ books in accessible collections, such as libraries, which allow for a more embodied understanding of these works.
The Papers of Charles F. Nims
Noel Cormack
The myriad relationships between archaeologists, archaeological sites, publications in distant metropoles, and the local inhabitants linked to those sites and digs are ones that require scholarly attention as the archaeological field reckons with its previously-enacted models of extraction and the exploitative relationships it created for the local residents of areas under archaeological investigation. At the University of Chicago, it is important to understand these complexities in the context of the Epigraphic Survey, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture’s (ISAC’s) foundational project of documentation-cum-analysis of the inscriptions and reliefs at the ancient Egyptian sites at Luxor.
In this project with the CSI and ISAC, we completed an archive-level documentation and analysis of the papers of Charles F. Nims, Egyptologist and field photographer for the Epigraphic Survey. Framing our work with the question, “How do tools like photography and field documentation shape archaeological knowledge?”, we aimed to further elucidate the relationship between field photography, archaeological site documentation, and the “oriental” lens. Through this process, we hoped to understand how Nims’ photography and academic work contributed to the dissemination and reproduction of the sites of ancient Egypt. In this examination, we also wished to understand the contours of Nims’ photographic practice and whether his work of field documentation, in spite of its’ commonly asserted ideal of positivist, as-it-is depiction, did, in fact, result in a specific, stereotyped, and essentialized view of its subjects, produced, at least in part, by the authorial choices of the photographer.
The focus of our engagement with the papers was the production of a fully-documented, cataloged, and searchable archive for researchers interested in Nims’ life and work. Producing this inventory required both simple documentation of the contents of folders in the collection as well as the creation of plain-text, prose descriptions for each folder. By providing this level of detail, our goal was to provide researchers the ability to precisely locate the data they were looking for in the archive—that instead of finding a record whose contents were listed as “hieroglyph notes”, they would find a folder whose contents were listed as, for example, “notes on Michigan Demotic Papyri, 1963”. The production of this type of archival record necessitated a close-reading and analysis of each item as we documented the collection. Ultimately, it was through our documentation-manifested close-reading and analysis that we developed a sense of the papers as a source and a potential answer to our framing questions.
Following documentation and close-reading of the Nims collection, we found that Nims’ work as a field photographer engaged in the Epigraphic Survey’s archaeological work was contributory to and sometimes intentionally productive of an “oriental” east. This is evidenced by choices Nims made in the composition, subjects, and description of certain photographs. We do think that a more substantial answer could be found to our initial questions about the role of field documentation in creating an “orientalized” East by drawing upon this collection as one source in a broader analysis of the published work of the Epigraphic Survey.
We propose that Charles F. Nims’ life and work, as represented in the ISAC collection, represents a valuable source for researchers interested in a wide variety of topics including, but not limited to, the connection between the development of Egyptology and the faith of its early scholars, the prominent role held by ancient Egypt in the public consciousness of a broad West in the 20th century, and certainly, the role played by field photography in creating and subsequently disseminating a vision of an “oriental East” to an American and European audience eager to receive it. We are confident that the work we undertook to document this archive and make its contents visible and searchable will transform the historical data contained in this collection from a hard-to-access, invisible-to-the-public state into a useful, public-facing resource for future generations of researchers interested in any aspect of Nims’ life and times. Finally, we hope that the specific work we did to analyze Nims’ work as Egyptologist and field photographer—presented in the 2026 CSI Symposium and future ISAC publications—helps to elucidate Nims’ substantial contributions to field documentation, his devotion to stereo and film photography, and the role played by Nims’ photography and field documentation in creating and propagating specific, and often stereotyped, understandings of local peoples and ancient sites.
Narrating Mesoamerican History
Noah DeMichaelis
In the 19th century, studies of Mesoamerican civilizations made the transition to discrete and academic discipline. However, as part of this transitional stage, this earlier scholarship frequently compared precolonial and early colonial Mesoamerican civilizations (including the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, etc) to ancient old-world civilizations. The purpose of my investigation is to better understand the nature of these comparisons. I am curious about which civilizations are most often compared, in what respect they are compared, and the implications of such comparisons. To address these questions, I read and documented every instance in which a Mesoamerican power is compared with an ancient old-world civilization in a wide range of 19th century texts. I found that comparisons with Ancient Egypt and Rome to be most frequent. However, references to ancient biblical and Greek civilizations were common as well. These comparisons included descriptions of ritual practice, cosmology, statecraft, and architecture. Comparisons with Egypt are of particular note, as similarities in hieroglyphics and architecture were used to further a hypothesis of shared origin between Egyptian and Mesoamerican civilizations. Overall, the frequency of comparisons diminished as the field developed an independent identity. While the precise nature of these comparisons warrants further study, my work aids current scholarship into ancient Mesoamerica by documenting a distinct evolution in approach over the 19th century. This provides critical context to understand the lineage of contemporary scholarship in Mesoamerican studies, while offering insights into the frame of reference of 19th century scholars in the field.
The Craft Chronicle
Rae Engrav
Contemporary art historians have proposed the concept of craft as a process, in part supported by its social nature. Interpersonal connections are vital in the sharing and shaping of skills, knowledge, and traditions. Historical scholarship, however, has favored the narrative of main actors working alone, leaving vast networks of collaboration reduced to side comments. The result is a disconnected body of knowledge where, while there is abundant literature that focuses on individuals, their place within a greater continuity is lost. The Craft Chronicle seeks to reconstruct these social and professional ties by creating a public digital database documenting craftspeople, craft institutions, and their relationships. To this end, I researched specific constituent artists using both primary and secondary sources to produce three records: a biographical sketch, a timeline of life events, and a list of relationships. These records were entered into the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment (OCHRE), a system that formats this work into a searchable website. Of the constituents I researched, two connection networks – those of British woodworker David Pye and Cherokee fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New – best demonstrated the different ways craftspeople intersect one another. Pye’s influence came largely from his books considering design from a theoretical perspective, while New brought Native American artists physically together in his founding of the Kiva Craft Center. Through tracing these artists’ connections, a more complete picture of how they came to their distinct approaches and the impact of their work emerged. For example, Pye’s ideological views on design came in part from his grandfather John Brett, who himself was the protégé of John Ruskin, an art historian whose writings helped inspire the Arts and Crafts movement. My research strengthens the position that a holistic, relational approach produces a more accurate history of craft by emphasizing the iterative nature of craft.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Medical Ethics in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
Fumi Kimura
The ongoing project Boundaries of Benevolence examines medical ethics in areas that rely on governing bodies that systematically deplete social determinants of health and access to healthcare: Chicago’s South Side and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (oPt). I argue that the study of medical ethics in the oPt should adopt a pluralistic moral outlook and recognize the moral weight of facts and terms. My survey of philosophical and psychological moral frameworks, working familiarity with Palestinian history and lives through reading Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama and Mohamed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, and analysis of International and Israeli Healthcare Providers’ statements after October 7th underpin this approach. Specifically, I find unidimensional moral frameworks incapable of capturing moral complexities portrayed in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama and Perfect Victims, and that many international and Israeli healthcare providers’ statements after October 7th distort their violations of medical ethics and the intentional destruction of the oPt’s healthcare system by invoking purely evaluative language. The shortcomings of universal frameworks and many international and Israeli healthcare providers’ statements reveal the need for a pluralistic and descriptive approach to researching medical ethics in the oPt. While important questions on the limits to knowing the truth of certain evidence and counteracting dehumanizing rhetoric remain, I suggest that adopting such a moral outlook to research is a substantial step towards doing the ongoing genocide justice.
The Group Portrait and Sociality in Literature and Art around 1900
Helena Kottman
Between approximately 1850 and 1930 in Austria-Hungary, two historical turning points altered sociality. First, urbanization eroded the traditional bourgeois family unit, prompting a rethinking of "natural" ways of living and a growing anxiety about the loss of community. Second, WWI inflicted mass trauma and further loss of community, prompting art obsessed with collectivity, through bodies melting together and dense groups of figures. This project contributes to Professor Ingrid Christian's forthcoming book by asking how artists, scientists, and theorists responded to this shift. I compiled a cross-disciplinary annotated bibliography of non-pictorial group portraits reflecting a concern with togetherness and dense collectivity. I then analyzed two articles by Deborah Coen on entomology in this period and assembled a second bibliography tracing the history of entomology, identifying a boom in the study of hive insects (ants and bees) that coincided with and responded to urbanization. As Coen notes, entomology also moved into domestic spaces, as seen in the rise of formicaria (ant terraria). I also compiled a list of works by the artist Käthe Kollwitz concerned with motifs of merged bodies and dense groups, and am now reading Sigmund Freud's texts on the loss of community, which address the same wartime loss that Kollwitz depicts. Across disciplines, this intense concern with togetherness reflects a compensatory reimagining of how society might cope with fragmentation and loss. In our own era of disappearing traditional domestic units and fewer in-person spaces for community, this past collective anxiety may help us understand how our own communities respond today.
The Value of Alternate Visions: Building an Interdisciplinary Virtual Human Rights Library
Abby Langer
The study of human rights relies on scholarship from a wide array of studies, creating a dense body of works often varied and extensive in nature. Yet few resources exist that draw upon the interdisciplinary potential of research and writings from the social sciences and the humanities. To provide a resource for human rights scholars pursuing knowledge from a variety of academic disciplines, I worked to consolidate material from various libraries and information services into a virtual hub dedicated to identifying resources both critical and relevant to the study of human rights. By consulting an assortment of sources and literature, I aimed to identify prominent academic writings in a variety of subjects and, more broadly, to refine an understanding of human rights scholarship that takes the value of the humanities and social sciences into account. Specifically, my research involves examining discipline-based libraries, encyclopedias, and bibliographies for articles, letters, historical papers, literature, and other digital materials that qualify as leading sources in their disciplines and important to the field of human rights. Ultimately, I found that employing a common thread, the pursuit of human dignity, as my lens through which I examine the source’s relation to human rights, became instructive in determining whether materials are deserving of a place in the library. Drawing from the humanities and social sciences provided a societal, cultural, and philosophical basis from which universal rights are conceived and promoted and illuminated an essential outlet for alternate expressions of human rights concerns. Although the definitional boundaries of human rights and their implications for the global order remains a subject of debate, my research points to the promise of interdisciplinary scholarship in articulating a broader, dignity-based conception of human rights.
InPLACE at Warren Woods
Olin Nafziger
Unlike traditional classroom-based learning, place-based experiential learning offers deeper ways of understanding nature through direct engagement with place, positioning the learner within the object of study and creating a multifaceted relationship between researcher and research site. For researchers in the environmental humanities, sustained interaction with nature can foster fuller understandings of the coevolved relationships between human and ecological components of both anthropogenic and natural systems. However, methodological approaches to environmental humanities field research, particularly in the Midwestern United States, remain limited and are often specialized to individual projects. In this project, I investigate how methods from ethnobotany and ethnoecology might inform a broader framework for experiential field research in the environmental humanities, with the aim of exploring how researchers might develop relationships with a place before approaching it as an object of study. The interconnected relationships between human and natural systems can be manifested in the practice of production, as people apply their intellectual understandings of nature to the physical practices of farming, foraging, and hunting. For environmental humanities researchers, the maintenance of human collective memory through these practices can reveal forms of adaptive value about the place under observation that would not otherwise be apparent. My individual interests center on practices of heirloom seed saving and food cultivation in an increasingly globalized world, and how linking the preservation of cultural diversity with agricultural biodiversity can allow us to maintain and reform bonds with the natural world through the everyday practices of food production and consumption.
InPLACE at Warren Woods
Aitana Rosas Linhard
The Warren Woods Ecological Field Station lies largely underutilized in Southwest Michigan. With 45 acres of diverse ecosystems and the support of the University of Chicago, the field station offers a unique opportunity to explore environmental questions through interdisciplinary perspectives. This convergence of disciplines embodies the environmental humanities, an emerging interdisciplinary field that brings together subjects such as literature, philosophy, history, and communication to better understand the relationships between people and the environment. Our research question asks: What does it look like to create an environmental humanities field station? More specifically, I explore how interactions with a field station can inform climate communication and encourage greater environmental stewardship. This exploratory project combines scholarly research on environmental humanities, climate communication, place attachment, conservation, and behavioral science with analysis of public-facing media, such as viral TikTok and youtube videos. I use bumble bees to understand how relationships with local species can shape perceptions of the natural world, while drawing on my own experiences at Warren Woods as a form of place-based observation and reflection. The project culminates in two creative outputs, a personal narrative and an original video essay, that use personal experience and a compelling narrative to explore how encounters with the field station shaped my understanding of climate communication and environmental stewardship. The research suggests that climate change is difficult to communicate in part because it is experienced as distant, abstract, and overwhelming, making concern difficult to translate into meaningful action. In contrast, repeated encounters with a particular place and its inhabitants can make environmental change more tangible. My experiences at Warren Woods demonstrate how attention to something as small as a bumble bee can expand into a broader awareness of one's surrounding environment. The project therefore argues that an environmental humanities field station can complement traditional ecological research by functioning not only as a site of scientific observation, but also as a space for the development of relationships with the natural world and other non-human living be(e)ings. Rather than treating climate change solely as a scientific or policy problem, this project suggests that cultivating meaningful connections to local environments may be an important foundation for environmental stewardship.
Virtual Human Rights Library
Maria Poltorykhina
Virtual libraries that catalogue materials on Human rights often are limited to legal materials, leaving its philosophical and historical dimensions under-catalogued. This project seeks to identify human rights writings/materials that are drawn from social sciences, the humanities and beyond to build out the the Virtual Human Rights Library at the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago. Drawing on academic articles, books, NGO and international-organization reports, media, fiction, and the bibliographies, I prioritized selecting sources centered on individuals, mostly excluding those focused primarily on state- or international-level political analysis. The rationale for selecting the literature was based on the role that particular works have played in the field, evaluated according to criteria such as the number of citations and their inclusion in other authors' bibliographies. Another criterion was thematic, including the work's connection to the development of civil society and the significance of themes related to upholding or defending equal human worth within the texts. The anticipated product is a bibliography of human rights literature spanning philosophical and historical works. It ranges from general inquiries into the discipline's foundational concepts, such as "right" and "dignity," and their historical development, to specific fields within it, such as the study of race and modern human rights crises worldwide. This work has implications for defining human rights within history and philosophy beyond an international-law-centered approach, though clear criteria for the subfield still need to be established.
Re-Staging a Japanese American Chicago
Miya Routh
The Re-Staging a Japanese American Chicago project documents the experiences of Japanese Americans who relocated to Chicago following their incarceration in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. While more than 20,000 Japanese Americans settled in the city after the war, many of their stories and neighborhood histories remain underrepresented in public memory. This project seeks to preserve these histories through oral history interviews that will serve as the foundation for a new theatrical work by Japanese novelist and playwright Yu Miri. As a research assistant, I attended interviews with community members and was responsible for transcribing, interpreting, and organizing multilingual oral histories, ensuring that participants' memories and cultural nuances were accurately preserved. Working closely with these narratives revealed recurring themes of displacement, resilience, community formation, and belonging, while also highlighting the interpretive challenges involved in translating lived experience across languages and mediums. By transforming oral histories into an accessible archival resource and eventually a theatrical performance, this project demonstrates how performance can function as a form of public history, preserving community memory while fostering dialogue about Japanese American experiences in Chicago. The project contributes to ongoing efforts to recover overlooked local histories and illustrates the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration among archival research, translation, and the performing arts to engage broader audiences.
The Craft Chronicle
Paisley Templeton
Occasionally, scholars consider artists and their artworks out of context, providing a disjointed picture of art history. Through my work with the Craft Chronicle to trace the relationships among certain 20th-century artists, I aimed to address this problem by examining how personal connections inspire artwork and by elucidating craft's contributions to the broader fields of art and art history. The Craft Chronicle operates through the digital tool OCHRE (the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment), which allows contributors to input the major events and relationships of constituents. My research focused on the lives and connections of several artists: Marie Zimmermann, an American jeweler and metalworker; Ladi Kwali, a Nigerian ceramist; Michael Cardew, a British studio potter and teacher; and Lucy Morgan, founder of Penland School of Craft. I consulted peer-reviewed journal articles, biographies, oral interviews, and primary-source newspapers, among other sources. I became especially interested in the intersection of colonialism and art, particularly as it manifested itself in the careers of Ladi Kwali and Michael Cardew. Through my work, I supported the Craft Chronicle's central goal of illuminating the contributions of the entire craft movement and community, rather than solely highlighting those of the most well-known artists.
Cognitive Collectivity: Industrialization and Collectivity in 19th/20th Western European Sociological Thought
Noah Youkhana
The 19th century marked a sudden shift in the spatial and cultural makeup of communities. Efforts taken up in the wake of industrialization shift smaller, proximity-based communities into a larger, urban setting. The project that I am contributing to analyzes the group portrait, both paintings and in the non-pictorial form, during this timeframe through the lens of shifting collectivity/community. One goal of this analysis is to understand how perception of collectivity/community changed around the early 20th century in response to mass urbanization and industrialization. To do this, the project required an examination of sociological writings on shifting modes of connectivity in the wake of 19th century industrialization and urbanization. I was tasked with reading up on various texts centered around the question of collectivity, community, and sociality from Ludwik Fleck, Carl Jung, Émile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tönnies. My research entailed combing through their writings to identify and summarize what these writers had to say about the foundation of community/collectivity, especially in regard to what maintains community and what causes its breakdown. From this, I identified a throughline between these thinkers built on the notion that collectivity can partially be understood as being rooted in a shared cognition of the world. Drawing on the writings of industrialization by Tönnies and Durkheim, I concluded that industrialization facilitated the abstraction of natural/social relations into a commodity form that resulted in a breakdown of cognitive collectivity. This suggests that the perception of community/collectivity underwent a change in the wake of 19th century industrialization that may have manifested itself in how group portraiture was depicted. Any findings related to the impact of industrialization on community and collectivity can help us understand how modern industrial society impacts our own ways of collectivity. It would be folly to consider the impact of industrialization as something that has no impact on contemporary society. Furthermore, as we face the precipice of a potential new rapid shift in labor/social relations brought on by artificial intelligence, it may be important to consider these findings to understand how we can maintain community.
Creating New Illness Narratives in VR
Sophia Zhang
Disability and illness narratives have historically been underrepresented in popular media, compared to other serious topics. As a result, many people with disabilities or neurodivergence face discrimination and stereotypes their whole life. Most of this comes from a lack of awareness from the general public, who are influenced by popular opinion rather than actual facts. Because of the widespread nature of the internet, it can be overwhelming for the average person to connect with every single issue out there. That being said, acknowledging the lived experience of people with chronic illness, disability, or neurodivergence is absolutely crucial. During the era of social media, the use of VR, a fairly 'new' technology, becomes especially powerful. With 3D visuals, immersive sound, and the naturally interactive quality of VR, I aim to craft a unique experience that stands out amidst the media people consume. My project specifically follows the experience of a young adult, A, with OCD, using repetitive movements, voicelines, and enabling varying levels of control/agency to simulate what a small portion of their day-to-day life might look like. The project includes an on-boarding and off-boarding segment to minimize priming bias, a domed room cluttered with "thoughts" (representing the mind), and a hallway where people are beckoned to repeatedly check whether a door is locked or not. By playing with space and sound, I attempt to recreate their perception of everyday places and the inside of their mind, all overlaid with a whispering internal monologue. While I take inspiration from a variety of sources on the OCD experience, this project is primarily focused on A's own experience. I hope that this lends the project a more personal touch, allowing people to feel particularly connected with A as they cycle through the virtual rooms. Because VR is less accessible to the general audience than a phone screen is, as of now this project lacks widespread reach. However, I believe that even a few people being able to explore A's lived experience can go a long way in improving understanding and empathy. This piece is just one example of a broader push by VR creators to acknowledge, share, and explore the lived experience of people living with illness or disability.
Mutated Togetherness: Aesthetic Synthesis and Collective Life in Fin-de-Siècle Austro-Germany
Vera Zhang
Between approximately 1850 and 1930, rapid industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of mass society destabilized traditional forms of community throughout Austro-Germany, raising a fundamental question: what happens to togetherness when the structures that once seemed to guarantee it begin to disappear? Contributing to Professor Ingrid Christian’s research on group portraiture and sociality, my work approached this question primarily through art history, examining how artists and theorists imagined forms of collectivity that could persist within, rather than escape from, the fragmentation of modern life. I focused particularly on the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” as connective tissue between seemingly disparate materials: Riegl’s account of group portraiture and relational unity, Sitte’s theorization of urban space, Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Fleck’s “thought collectives,” and artistic attempts to synthesize individuals, media, and spaces into larger wholes. Across these sources, I found a recurring desire for social collectivity through aesthetic synthesis: from the coordination of autonomous individuals within the group portrait to the integration of different arts envisioned by the Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet the urgency of this desire to synthesize also exposes the fragmentation it attempts to overcome. I therefore argue that the Gesamtkunstwerk offers a model of what might be called a “mutated togetherness”: not the recovery of an organic community destroyed by modernity, but the construction of new forms of collective life in which autonomy, difference, and togetherness coexist. Seen this way, the repeated pursuit of aesthetic unity around 1900 reveals both an extreme desire for togetherness in the face of social loss and a broader transformation from inherited forms of organic unity toward deliberately constructed, relational forms of belonging.